


Catog

by speakmefair



Category: Coriolanus - Shakespeare
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Steampunk, Dragons, F/M, M/M, Multi, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-25
Updated: 2011-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-28 02:04:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/302534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/speakmefair/pseuds/speakmefair
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone waits on a platform for a story that may never come.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Catog

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gileonnen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gileonnen/gifts).



Because Virgilia was atrociously bad at keeping secrets, she'd been forbidden by Cominius to pick Aufidius up at their awful station. In the end, they'd relented — after all, the whole thing had been her idea and it seemed mean to exclude her.

"What happened?" she said, when she first saw Aufidius, running down the platform to greet him. "You look so — oh, you look so different!"

"I feel different." For once, Aufidius didn't flinch when she pushed her arm through his.

"Darling —" Virgilia said helplessly, and stopped. She looked tired and upset. She took her arm away, and carried on walking down the platform, through the steam and the smuts, but she looked smaller, suddenly, and more vulnerable.

Her hair was covered in dust, and there was a hole in her stocking, when she jumped aside for a running dog, a little laddered hole above the high fur-lined boots.

"What did I say wrong?" Aufidius asked the clearing steam.

**

"We were petrified," Cominius said later, a little restored after strong tea, or rather tea strengthened by spirits. "We thought you might be stuck there too."

But Aufidius still couldn't talk about it. He felt dazed and strange, like someone who had broken their leg and must find a new way of walking.

"My —" he started, and stopped. "Zingar, my, he —"

He felt Virgilia's hand squeeze his. "It's all right," she said gently. "We know about — about losing them. You don't have to say if you don't want to."

"I'm not trying to be mysterious." Aufidius tried for a smile, thought of Zingar, his lovely Zingar, beautiful and darkly iridescent; of his wings, of his rippling scales, his hot breath and loving, amused mind, living within Aufidius's body, and knew he failed. "I promise."

"We know," Cominius said, and stared out at some terrible vista.

"We know," Virgilia whispered, and oh.

Oh, the whole world had known of Cominius's loss, but that Virgilia should have —

She tightened her fingers.

Outside, the sky grew crimson.

"Would you have missed it for anything?" she asked suddenly. "Even the bad bits? Do you — do you feel that?"

"No. I mean, yes." Aufidius had hardly heard a word. "I don't know."

"Come with me," Virgilia said, and her hand was still in his, and she took him across the red dust of the paths, under the deepening sky, towards the stables.

"No," Aufidius said. "No — no —"

"Yes," Virgilia said gently. "All things change."

The colours of the sunset had deepened again, and now a dozen or so gravid dragons looked curiously towards them over their stable doors; others glided in dreamy circles above their heads, heating the underskirts of the clouds to prepare for the coming storm, where they would ride the lightning.

There had been a man once who would have ridden with them.

"Come," Virgilia said.

In the last little hall, a beautiful, slightly mad-looking Jezri-Drago stood, all but blowing forth flame to match her brothers, ready to fight.

She liked this no more than Aufidius did.

Virgilia stopped in front of her, hushing words in the way Caius had done, the secret language of the born riders, and Aufidius stopped his ears.

Virgilia turned.

"Now cometh the hour, Tullus," she said. "Look and listen."

Aufidius's ears rang in the warm, familiar silence of expectation, of awaiting, of _willing_. The gravid females breathed around him, hot and pressing.

He wanted to run.

"Dust-hour," Virgilia said.

"Enough to send you to sleep." That was Cominius, from the back of the stone halls.

"But not yet, because —" Virgilia put her hands over Aufidius's eyes. "—here's your surprise." She pushed him towards the barrier of the awaiting door. " _Look_ ," she whispered softly, hot breath, hot as a dragon's, and why should it not be, having lost hers? — against his ear — "After all..."

Aufidius's heart leapt in his chest, and the sounds of the halls grew shriller in his ears, but when he saw it, he had only a second to adjust his expression.

It was a _catog_. Nothing but a baby, still dampened by its birth, lying on a heap of blood-stained embroidered cloths, all that Virgilia must have been able to find for softened gold. And above it its mother, fierce and proud, flame flickering in her open mouth — and oh, she was black, she was black, just like Zingar, lacking only his iridescence to be the perfect image —

And all the way here, wounded from the twice-thrust soul cut, the one he had felt when Zingar fell and the other, the worse, when Caius blinked out of mind and knowledge, he had been thinking — he had imagined — oh, it didn't matter what he had imagined, only that one of them, both of them, would be here after all.

 _Stupid, stupid, stupid._

The _catog_ was mist-coloured with red-gold eyes and ridiculous baby scales like powder-puffs. Aufidius forced himself to smile at it, as Virgilia grabbed his hand and beamed down at it with delight.

It got to its feet, tottered over to them to sniff their hands, was all hot velvet and metallic breath and —

And —

" _Oh,_ " said Aufidius, as it leant its chin into his palm, trusting and dear and _his_. " _Oh._ "

He made himself concentrate. If he started to cry now he might never stop.

"It came last night," Virgilia said, "and the most embarrassing thing is, well, I suppose Caius would have known, but I had no idea, and — I took her out, she was so fretful, and — and then late last night —"

"Were you frightened?" Aufidius asked. He felt gut-punched. _Caius's foal. Caius's foal, and he — no, no she — is starting a bond line, and —_

"No, we weren't frightened at all," Virgilia said, looking at him strangely. "We were lucky to have a Coriolan here."

And it was then he realised that her nails were digging into the palm of his hand, and when he turned around, Caius was there.

**

And then he did something that Virgilia teased him about for months afterwards.

" _You_!" he shouted. He put his arms around Caius and hugged him fiercely; he'd been in tears.

It was just the sight of him.

The sight of him.

Real, and alive, and the bond between them singing, and the new _catog_ , huffing out confused sparks, and —

"You!"

He would have been embarrassed, but for one thing.

Caius, Caius Martius, dragon-rider, wept with him and laughed with him and held him back as tightly, and said —

" _Thank you, thank you, thank you,_ " like a prayer.

And Virgilia crowed for joy above them both.


End file.
